


A State of Some Confusion

by Sholio



Series: Free of Surface Ties [18]
Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, White Collar
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-27
Updated: 2014-11-27
Packaged: 2018-02-27 06:19:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2682284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Nightmares become too much, you go mad. The fortunate have friends who can care for them in that state. (The continuing adventures of the White Collar characters in Fallen London.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A State of Some Confusion

Normally Peter tried not to let himself get overly concerned when Neal went missing. It was hardly unusual for any of them to go off on their own for a few days. He himself was prone to vanishing into the Wastes or the marshes around the observatory in search of beasts for the Labyrinth. Neal ... he didn't even _want_ to know what Neal got up to when he disappeared.

But he had a bad feeling about it this time. 

It was that damned Correspondence, he thought grimly. Neal and El had both become obsessed with it, staying up till all hours poring over musty texts at the University, or venturing deep into the Forgotten Quarter to dig up stones with half-effaced sigils carved on them. Peter hadn't ever been able to see the appeal; those squirming, eyestrain-inducing symbols gave him headaches and made him nauseous, and he sometimes got the feeling that it didn't like him.

Try as he might, though, he couldn't convince them to keep away from it. All he could do was hold El in the night when she woke gasping from nightmares, or accompany Neal into some of the more dangerous corners of the Forgotten Quarter to watch his back while Neal became engrossed in studying old ruins.

No one in London got as much sleep as they should -- Peter was used to seeing the familiar pallor and blue-shadowed eyes on the faces of people he passed in the streets. His own rest was not the best these days, either. But El and Neal had both been looking worse and worse. He knew that El had taken to staying up for several nights in a row, pushing herself until she was exhausted enough to sleep without dreams. And she had Peter to bring her food and cups of tea, and wrap her in a blanket when she fell asleep at her desk. He tried to drop "coincidentally" by Neal's lodgings as often as possible in the hope of dragging Neal out to get a decent meal or just getting him away from those damnable plaques for a while, but Neal had become increasingly elusive. When Peter did manage to find him, Neal's skin had an unhealthy grey pallor and he was jumpy, talking too fast and looking over his shoulder. He said things that didn't make any sense, rambling about a cheerful gentleman, a chess game and a burning river. (Peter had been dreaming, more often than he cared for, of storms and a ship on a dark sea, but at least nothing was on fire.)

And now Neal was gone. El said she hadn't seen him. She was looking a little better these days; she'd recently begun working towards starting her own newspaper and it seemed to have distracted her, to Peter's great relief, from her pursuit of the Correspondence.

"Maybe Neal's off with Mozzie somewhere."

"That doesn't reassure me," Peter muttered.

He didn't want to launch a full-scale search -- Neal certainly wouldn't appreciate it, especially if he turned out to be holed up in a honey-den with a debauched princess or something of that nature. However, he was worried enough to start questioning urchins until he managed to track down Mozzie, cornering him at last in a bookshop in Elderwick. Mozzie hadn't seen Neal either. 

"He's not well, you know," Mozzie said, pushing his Neathglass goggles to the top of his head but still not quite meeting Peter's eyes.

Peter felt the pit of his stomach drop a little. "What do you mean, not well?"

Mozzie gave him a sharp, shrewd look. "Despite your association with the Constables, I know you're not a fool. You've noticed it too."

Peter sighed and leaned on a shelf of books, raising a dusty leather smell and garnering a glower from the proprietor. "Yeah," he said. "I know."

Mozzie looked around, then sidled closer, opening a book and pretending to study it. "One of the urchins reports seeing him in the Forgotten Quarter," he murmured. "Don't tell anyone I told you. But ..." He looked up, his eyes somehow vulnerable. "Let me know if you find him."

Peter nodded.

 

***

 

The Forgotten Quarter was large, and devoid of Peter's usual contacts; the only people you generally ran into here were scholars, devils, grave-robbers, or criminals looking for a place to hide their loot. He was never going to find Neal by brute-force searching. Instead he was going to have to be smart about it. He knew Neal, knew him well. Where would Neal most likely go? He didn't want to ask El about likely locations for digging up Correspondence plaques; she was finally sleeping through the night again, and he was afraid of setting her off. Instead he went to the University, alternately using bullying and bribes to get someone to locate some Forgotten Quarter maps for him. And then he packed himself a lunch and went looking. 

He found a lot of empty dig sites, a few annoyed devils, and a trio of canoodling lovers behind a collapsed stone pillar, but no Neal. In the end, as it turned out, it was not any special sense for Neal's whereabouts, but simple good fortune that led him to a particular ruined temple, with a sunken court, half-filled with sand, where a ragged figure huddled against the wall.

"Neal?"

Peter fell to his knees beside him. Neal was staring blankly ahead, not blinking. For a moment Peter thought he was dead, which would be ... well, not _good_ , but at least something he knew how to deal with. All he'd have to do was carry Neal back to the cottage, mend his wounds, and wait for him to recover.

But Neal had no visible wounds, and his chest rose and fell, although he didn't move in response to Peter's gentle shake. He was filthy, his fingernails broken and his hands stained with things Peter couldn't recognize. He was also terribly thin and pale, his lips dry and cracked. He might not be dead yet, but at the rate he was going, he looked halfway there.

"Neal, come on," Peter said. He started to give Neal another gentle prod, then tried a different tactic and put his arm around him, raising him carefully to his feet.

Neal was not hard to move, once Peter got him standing up. He came willingly, although he plodded slowly through the sand like a sleepwalker. His lips were slightly parted, his eyes fixed on something Peter couldn't see. Once he giggled; another time he gave a small cry, like someone startled by a mouse.

They made slow progress through the empty, windblown streets of the Quarter, and Peter found himself much tenser than he had been earlier. Although London was dangerous, he usually felt little fear when he walked its streets. He always went well armed and, though he rarely sought battle, he was confident in his ability to defend himself. He wasn't sure why he found himself looking over his shoulder now. Perhaps it was only that Neal was so very helpless, and Peter knew that he would have to protect not only himself in a fight, but his companion as well. Or maybe it was the vacant look in Neal's usually sharp eyes, setting him on edge.

Neal stumbled suddenly over a break in the cracked cobbles. He made no attempt to break his own fall, and cracked his chin hard on the stones. When Peter helped him up, he was limp-kneed and wobbly, but his face was still distant. He smiled suddenly, a vacant smile with no recognition in it, and his dry lips cracked and bled. 

_He's weak,_ Peter thought, self-accusing. _You've had him on a forced march, when he's been out here for who knows how long without food or water or sleep ..._

"Come on," he said, steering Neal with gentle hands to sit on the cracked remains of an old stone bench. Once, this place might have been a park; now there was nothing but baroque ruins and the low sobbing of the feeble wind. Peter held his canteen to Neal's broken lips and got him to swallow some water, then got out the last meat pasty from the lunch he'd packed. When he put it in Neal's hand, it slipped out and fell to the sand, but Peter found that he could get Neal to eat by breaking it into pieces and feeding them to him one by one.

Neal flinched abruptly, making Peter jump too. "What is it?" he asked, but there was still no recognition in Neal's eyes, no awareness of his surroundings visible on his face. Still, something had troubled him; he wore a slight frown, and then, to Peter's dismay and growing horror, Neal's face twisted and tears welled in his eyes.

"Neal, please," Peter said helplessly. Neal's obvious distress broke his heart, especially since there was nothing to be done about it. Whatever was hurting him was in his own head.

Tears streaked through the dirt on Neal's face, and Peter couldn't bear it. He wrapped his arms around Neal, drawing him in and holding him. Neal's body was shockingly thin and light; how long had it been since he'd had a proper meal of any sort? He was shuddering faintly, and his shallow, dry breaths ghosted against Peter's neck. But slowly, he began to relax, until he was draped limply in Peter's arms.

"Neal?" Peter drew back a little so that he could see Neal's face. He hoped for a moment that Neal had fallen asleep, but his eyes were still cracked open, flashes of blue visible under his tear-clumped lashes. He wore a faint, absent smile. At least he wasn't crying anymore.

Peter felt in his overcoat pocket for a bat. There was one curled up there, asleep. It chirped grumpily when he pulled it out into the dim light. "Come on, I've some work for you," Peter said. He scribbled a quick note to El and fastened it to the bat's leg, then gave its head a stroke with his thumb. "Take this to Elizabeth," he said, and tossed it into the air. It caught the wind and quickly vanished into the gloom.

Then he coaxed Neal gently back on his feet. "Elizabeth will be expecting us. Come on. Let's go get you cleaned up and warm."

 

***

 

Elizabeth was waiting for them, the lights of the cottage spilling out into the murky gloom of the city. Peter shepherded Neal across the threshold and felt, as always, the lift in his spirits that he got when he closed the door behind him and shut London away. The cottage was always well-lit and tidy, and tastefully furnished with Elizabeth's impeccable eye for decorating. The crackle of the fire, the chittering of bats in the rafters and the low purr of El's Tigress reminded him as always that he was safe at home.

"Oh," El whispered, seeing Neal's condition. She herded him closer to the fire. "I've drawn a bath. That's something probably you should help him with, hon; I'll get something for both of you to eat, and maybe some of your things for him to wear."

Neal looked a little better when he was clean, shaven, and dressed in something other than the filthy remnants of his University robes, but he was still eerily vacant-eyed, reacting to unseen people and things. Still, they got him to eat a bowl of soup and drink some Tincture of Vigour-laced tea, and settled him in front of the fire. He gazed unseeing at the flames, sometimes raising a hand as if to grasp an invisible object.

"I've seen people like this before," El murmured. "When the dreams become too much."

Peter had, too: the hollow-eyed mad, slumped in alleys or giggling quietly to themselves in the back rooms of tea shops and dockside bars. They were not dangerous, so far as he knew -- just difficult to watch.

Neal shivered, a full-body shudder. Peter put a hand on his shoulder and he seemed to calm down, or maybe he just moved somewhere else in the dreamscape that ruled him now. "Do they ... come back?" he asked softly, not sure if he wanted to know the answer.

"They often do," El said. "There was someone in the court just recently, a young Lord -- the mad-doctors could do nothing, but then I went to pay my respects to the Duchess a few days later and there he was, clear-eyed and healthy again."

"Did you ask him about it?" If anyone should ask, El would have. She was always curious about the inner workings of things.

She nodded. "He said he had thought himself in a vast hotel, filled with wondrous and terrible things, where people had the wrong heads and none of the doors opened onto the same rooms twice. Sometimes he thought he might stay there forever." Her gaze drifted to Neal, as Peter's did also. "But sometimes he could think of nothing more than getting out, back to where everything made sense again."

_As much sense as anything makes anymore,_ Peter thought gloomily. Still, there had been madmen on the Surface too. "Did he mention if anything seemed to help him?"

El shook his head. "He didn't really know, he said. The entire thing was like a dream, and you know how hard it is to talk about dreams, or to remember exactly how things happened. But sometimes he would hear voices that were like those of people he used to know, or see faces that seemed familiar even if they were the wrong shape. And eventually he found his way back to them."

She lowered her small hand to rest it beside Peter's, on Neal's thin shoulder. "All we can do is let him know that we're here, and give him something to come back to."

 

***

 

There followed some of the longest days and nights of Peter's life.

He and El arranged that there would always be someone home to watch Neal, to make sure he didn't stumble into the fireplace or, even worse, walk out the door and vanish into the streets of the city. Mozzie came over sometimes to sit with him and talk of things Peter thought he was better off not knowing about. June came, too, and Diana, and some of Neal's other friends.

But there was little change in Neal. Sometimes it seemed that Peter caught a hint of awareness in his eyes; sometimes he turned his head as if responding to El moving in the room, or the Tigress stretching beside the fire. But then he'd vanish again, into whatever world he was lost in.

There were times when he was seized with helpless delight, and those were hard to take -- the laughter, God, the _laughter_ \-- but at least he was happy, and it was nice to see him smile again. The times when he became lost in the grip of despair were much worse. All that Peter and El could do was hold him until he stopped weeping, or mumbling incoherent apologies under his breath.

But those times were also the times that Peter felt Neal was closest -- when it seemed that he was only one frustrating, elusive step from finding his way back. When they soothed and comforted him, he seemed almost to respond to their touch, in a way he didn't at any other time. Sometimes he would clasp El's hand, or bury his face in Peter's shoulder, pressing into him. And Peter had never felt so helpless, wishing that he knew enough to say or do the right thing, the one thing that would bring Neal back.

El had been bringing texts and letters home from the University, even old scrolls and tablets written in scripts that looked like nothing more than lines and blobs to Peter. She pored over them, looking for a way to help Neal. Peter asked his own contacts, too, inquiring after tales of madness around the docks and in the Constables' canteen. 

It turned out that everyone had their own pet remedy for the problem. 

"Oh, dunk 'im in the river by the light of the false-stars an' three foxfire candles. Let 'im drown three times, chasing off the Drownies if they try to take 'im. That's the way to do it."

"No, no, it's the honey, that's the way back. Not the reg'lar honey, but the red honey, the stuff what you can't buy. You 'ave to know a guy."

"Honey-dreams, Drownies -- pshhhh. Me old gran used to make up a poultice of foxglove and mandrake -- the leaves, mind, not the roots. It works a treat. I'll have her write it out for you --"

Peter thought that if things didn't improve soon, he might be desperate enough to try poultices and even stranger remedies. He wasn't sure how much of this he could take.

But in the end, it happened suddenly. Mozzie had left after another late night of searching through old texts with Elizabeth, and she'd fallen asleep at her desk, dropping her head onto a book. Peter quietly covered her with a blanket and went downstairs to check on Neal, whom he'd left beside the fire.

Neal wasn't there.

Peter's heart lurched into his throat. This was what they'd been so careful about -- Neal hardly even moved on his own, but the one time that Peter left him alone --

Then he became aware of Neal standing by the window, so still that Peter, by the dim light of the dying fire and a few candles, hadn't even realized he was there.

The window was shuttered; Neal was standing and staring blankly at the shutters. Peter wondered what he saw there. Lightly, he rested a hand on Neal's shoulder to steer him back into the room, but Neal turned his head and looked at Peter, really _looked_ at him for the first time. In a sleepy voice, he said, "Could you open them, please?"

Not trusting his voice, hardly daring even to breath, Peter unlatched the shutters and then opened the casement as well, letting in the dank night air of London.

Neal inhaled it deeply, leaning on the sash. Peter watched him in profile. Neal was looking out at the night, and he really did seem to be looking at it, his eyes scanning the familiar streets and the humped shape of the Observatory looming over them.

And Neal looked ... _good_ , Peter thought, well-rested and alert, his eyes bright and clear in a way they hadn't been for weeks, maybe months before his disappearance.

Finally he turned and looked at Peter, and smiled faintly.

"It's good to see you," he said. "I think ... I've been gone, haven't I?"

"You have," Peter said, and then gripped his shoulder and pulled him into a crushing hug, startling both of them. A bat, squashed in Peter's pocket between them, let out an annoyed squeak. Neal stiffened in surprise and then relaxed, awkwardly patting Peter on the back. 

Into his hair, Peter murmured, "Yes, you have been. It's good to see you too."


End file.
